A Buddhist philosophical analysis distinguishes six modes of conscious attention tied to sensory modalities, plus a seventh, 'defiled mind' (klisṭamanas), which Asaṅga posits as a more basic form of self-awareness. This seventh mode is associated with the 'notion of I' and represents a modification of the traditional five-skandha system. The paper examines how these concepts, developed by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, address self-consciousness and conscious attention to oneself within Buddhist philosophy of mind.
Buddhist philosophy of mind denies that the self is the agent of actions, including thinking. In the 5th-century thinker Buddhaghosa's account, attention replaces self in explaining how cognition is grounded in perception and action. Attention performs two simultaneous functions: placing and focusing. A comparison with Brian O'Shaughnessy's thought clarifies what is at stake when the concept of self is used as a derived rather than a primitive notion.
The chapter examines subjective accounts of the 'immersed' self, contrasting them with bodily accounts that ground the self in bodily feeling. It presents a key thesis of Buddhist philosophy of mind: proto-intentional psychological processes—proto-cognitive and proto-affective—jointly constitute conscious intentional experience. This experience presents the world with attention on objects perceptually registered under schematic stereotypes, organized in a hodological appraisal space of affordance and obstacle, shaping diachronic flow. The theory's elegance lies in recognizing the irreducibility of phenomenal character, admitting joint contributions of sensation and conceptualization, acknowledging affect-saturated experience, and making attention intrinsic to experience.
The phrase "cosmic consciousness" was coined by the English socialist, philosopher, and gay rights activist Edward Carpenter in the 1890s. Carpenter invented the term to paraphrase the teachings of an Indian sage, Ramaswami, who described a universal, all-encompassing consciousness possible for humans, a concept common among Advaita-inspired sages. Later, William James and others repurposed the phrase to argue that the cosmos itself might possess consciousness, an early formulation of cosmopsychism.